New technologies are continually emerging, enabling new types of content to be delivered over mobile networks for use with mobile terminals. The success of Short Message Service (SMS) fueled further developments such as Enhanced Messaging Service (EMS), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), and other communications protocols which allow the transmission of more than merely textual content. These and other new technologies allow for a variety of different types of content to be communicated to and from mobile (and landline) devices, including ringing tones, icons, Java games, video clips, software tools, etc.
However, with the increasing use of multimedia content on mobile devices, it can be difficult to store and/or transfer these voluminous pieces of content on mobile terminals such as mobile telephones. Because multimedia content can be quite sizeable in terms of digital volume, providing content on removable memory cards rather than over-the-air (OTA) has become a popular way of distributing digital content to mobile users.
For this type of digital content delivery to be beneficial for all parties concerned, solid methods for managing the access and use of the content needs to be in place. To ensure business profitability, content retailers/providers' copyrights need to be protected to provide an incentive for such providers to continue developing and publishing digital content. Content retailers include, for example, operator portals, various media companies, and entrepreneurs. One manner of providing such protection is to secure the content on removable memory cards, so that only authorized users can access, use, or distribute the content.
However, current solutions for allowing access to such secure content are generally too complex for mobile content solutions, or limited to configurations at the time of manufacturing of the mobile terminals in which the removable memory cards will be installed. For example, existing solutions for securing content includes large-scale, complex third-party software/hardware solutions (e.g., for high-quality music), or the use of secure removable media technology such as Secure MMC™. With respect to the complex third-party solutions, such solutions are targeted at very valuable content, which is often an unnecessary and overly expensive solution for mobile content. Further, such solutions are proprietary and are not interoperable, and are of a significant size that is simply not useful in the context of small, mobile communication devices. With respect to secure removable media technology, these solutions only address the problem of security on the memory card, and do not address security at the implementation level. Content retailers are also forced to use these expensive special-purpose cards if security is desired, which adversely affects profitability.
Furthermore, existing solutions provide a manner of allowing access to secure content by configuring a terminal at the time of manufacturing of the mobile terminal. The prior art does not provide an adequate solution for allowing on-demand access to secured content pre-programmed onto a portable memory device that can be used on a mobile user's existing mobile terminal.
Accordingly, there is a need in the communications industry for a manner of providing mobile terminal users with on-demand activation of secured content provided on portable memory devices. The present invention fulfills these and other needs, and offers other advantages over the prior art.